Friday, November 14, 2014

Am I naive? (1)

A friend of mine, an economist working at one of the international financial institutions and commenting on a previous post, asked me how I could be so naive to think that social scientists would do their work "regardless of the interests of individuals and
institutions"???
The three questionmarks were his.

He then continued (refering to my earlier proposal to form a G24 or G25 to change the world) saying that most parliamentarians know exactly what needs to be done to improve the world and that, if problems are not solved in the direction we want, it is not because of a lack of ideas of how to improve the global economic system but because a few own the economic wealth, a few more share in the distribution of income and both defend tooth and nail (vigorously) that wealth and income.

I am less naive than my friend thinks, because in my view it is not only the so-called 1 percent who defends their interests and the global economic system, opposite to the other 99 percent of the population, but it is a majority who defends it!!! In my view, the system is maintained by a large group (a majority?) of what I would call 'small capitalists' and those who would like to become small capitalists.

Yes, I am one of those small capitalists and I suppose you are too. And even though we may wish to change the system, reality is that we support it and benefit from it, in various ways (even though we may also suffer from it.)

Do you disagree?

My economist friend said something else worth quoting, "The distribution of world income is much worse than the distribution of income in the most unequal country of the world and, in its turn, wealth is much worse distributed than income."

Finally, my friend said that the message in my previous post that we, the experts, should be nice and explain to people how to improve the world seems to underestimate their capacity.

About Me

As a kid I liked numbers and the sound of strings. I considered studying engineering but chose social sciences because of my interest in people. I combine a theoretical interest with a practical, social approach which brought me to the sphere of policy research. I am interested in reducing the disparity between poor and rich, between the powerful and the less powerful.
In 1973 and 1982 I lived in Latin America. In the mid-1980s, I was able to create an international forum to discuss the functioning of the international monetary system and the debt crisis, the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD). I established it with the view that the debt crisis of the 1980s was a symptom of a malfunctioning, flawed global monetary and financial system.
I was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Network on Debt and Development that was established at the end of the 1980s to help put pressure on European policymakers.
In 1990, before the beginning of the Gulf War, I cofounded the Golfgroep, a discussion group about international politics comprising journalists, scientists, politicians and activists that meets regularly.
The website of FONDAD is www.fondad.org